#oh shut up we have melanosomes isotopes and a decent understanding of anatomy and animal behavior

[void-of-unparalled-chaos]

Everytime I hear someone say Paleontologists can't possibly know anything I die a little inside.

Allow me to introduce to you Psittacosaurus, a very basal relative of Triceratops from Mongolia and China.

This is one of the most accurate models of any extinct animal ever made complete with accurate coloration, sizing, scales, and quills. We know this animal down to its cloaca. Literally. Paleontologists were able to reconstruct its cloaca from the above fossil, alongside the pigmentation and scales.

I don't have time to write everything out, but here is a video that covers it. It's an absolutely fascinating specimen!

Or if you would rather read the scientific papers yourself...

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.